Thou Wert Once So Good
by Neon Kitsune
Summary: This is someone she thought she knew.  Outsider POV, rating for some disturbing imagery.


Janet Carter is pissed.

She's pissed at herself, because while there's no shame in giving in when they've got the drop on you, she should never have _let _them get the drop on her; she's no soldier but she grew up in a tough part of town and she knows how to keep her awareness stretched out so that no one can sneak up. And it's been years and college and a lot of sidelong looks from people with more sedate upbringings since she needed that skill, but she does it anyway because paranoia only has to pay off once.

She's pissed at the guy who followed her to her car as she walked to it in the early twilight of midwinter, who she never even heard until he was right up on her, and she doesn't remember a rag over her mouth or a blow to the head, but something like that must have happened because she just blacked out, and now she's here.

Mostly, though, she's pissed because it's that or rocking, whimpering terror, and given that choice she'll take pissed.

She doesn't know where she is. It's a huge, dark space, though during the day trickles of light come in from high, small windows that make her think _warehouse_ or _factory_; God knows there are enough of those around this town and plenty of them are out of use since the steel industry bottomed out in the seventies.

She's chained up, literally chained with literal metal shackles that attach to an eyebolt screwed into the concrete of the floor. There's not a piece of metal involved that's thinner than her thumb, and the wrist cuffs are tight enough that she has to keep wiggling her fingers lest her hands go numb. Janet has a little experience with being tied up, but it's never been for more than an hour, maybe two, before, and it's starting to get really old. Besides which, the other times she was tied up she could safeword out if it got to be really too much, and that doesn't seem to be an option this time around.

She's been here three days. By now Bill is frantic, her parents are going nuts with fear, the police are starting to make noises about how they need to prepare themselves, because one thing she knows is that this is not a routine kidnapping. There's been no "Talk to them on the phone so they know you're alive" or pictures taken with a newspaper in the frame.

Besides, there were the others. Three other women were there when Janet woke up. Kim was taken out not long after, Priya the next night, and Susan the next. And now there's no one but her, and it's coming on to that time of night, and if she thinks about it too hard the rocking and whimpering will break through because every time, not long after they came and took one of the others, the screaming started.

The last few hours, it's occurred to her that it might really be better to figure out a way to kill herself.

And that is what she's thinking about when there's a new sound from outside the limits of what she can see. This place doesn't have rooms exactly, but she's in a part of the space that's divided by stacks of crates and junk; it makes a cell of sorts, though she could climb over the stacks if she weren't chained to the floor. So when the first gunshot comes, it's a total shock. There's a shriek that sounds like pain and rage and fear, and she hears a man's voice shouting and it's words she can understand—her captors never talked to her, and she couldn't figure out what language they were using to talk to each other; she studied linguistics at Stanford but nothing she'd ever read about used the combination of sounds that came out of their mouths.

What he's shouting is, "That one, get that one!" and right about then is when she stops being pissed, because this means that _someone is coming for her_. She is not going to die screaming like Kim and Priya and Susan. She starts to cry in sheer relief.

She can't tell much about what's going on out there, just shouting and gunshots and those terrible shrieks. So it's a total surprise when a man bursts around the corner into her little cell, shotgun held ready. Janet's eyes widen at the sight of him, because he is _huge_, taller than Bill even and Bill's well over six feet. And there's something about him that tugs at a chord of memory.

He meets her eyes squarely. "Are you hurt?" he demands. Dumbfounded, still sniffling, she shakes her head. He comes over to her and kneels, setting his gun aside to reach for her shackled wrist. The cuff is held on with a small, sturdy padlock, the kind of thing you'd buy to lock your luggage. His hands are large and gentle and he glances up at her and smiles. "Piece of cake," he says. He slaps his pockets quickly, pulls out a little leather folder, and opens it. Inside there are metal things that look kind of like dentist's tools, and he selects two of them and what is it about him that she _knows_?

He's just started poking at the lock on the first shackle when someone yells, "A little help here!" and his head snaps around. He looks back at her and says, "Do you know how to use these?"

"No," Janet manages, and he nods. "OK. Use this one to put torque on the keyway, and just keep brushing the pins. It'll pop eventually. I'll be back in a minute if you can't get it." And he picks up his gun and is gone again.

Miracle of miracles, she gets the first lock almost at once, though she thinks it was luck more than anything else. She's working on the second, which isn't nearly so obliging, when there's another shriek outside the tiny area she can see and someone yells, "Sam!" and her hands twitch so hard that the lockpicks drop and go skittering away.

Because when Janet was at school, her freshman roommate was a girl named Jessica Moore. They'd been lucky in that they got along well enough to be friends. So when Jess had met a boy, it had been cause for celebration. Janet remembers him from the endless late-night study sessions, tall but slouching in his chair like everyone else, rubbing his eyes against the fatigue, drinking endless cups of coffee. She remembers how gentle he was with Jess and how carefully he moved, as if he knew that people were sometimes scared of him just because he was such a big man. She remembers a phone call on Saturday night, when she had enquired idly and been told, oh, he's away with his brother, can you believe it? Something about their dad being late back from a hunting trip.

And she remembers getting the next phone call, the one that told her Jess was dead and her boy had hung around barely long enough to talk to the police before leaving again with the mysterious brother.

Janet had been angry with him for a while, to run away when his friends wanted to help him, to grieve with him over the loss of someone they'd all loved. But she'd gotten over that, because everyone handles grief differently.

Which had been fine, until the day an FBI agent named Henricksen showed up at her door wanting to ask her questions about Sam Winchester. He hadn't said much straight out, but later Janet had used the clues he'd dropped and a little bit of Internet research to put together a picture that horrified her. The brother, Dean, was some kind of murderer, insane, obsessed with killing people he thought were "monsters", and sometimes just killing people for the hell of it. There'd been women tortured to death.

And Sam—Sam was going along with it.

Janet hadn't wanted to believe that the boy she remembered could be doing the things he was accused of. She still thinks there was something off about the picture her research had put together, but she can admit that it's more trying to reconcile what she remembers with what Henricksen told her; she can't imagine Sam, who was so careful not to loom over people, killing anyone, much less innocents.

And now he's here. From the sound of it, he's killing people all right, even though if she's honest with herself Janet can't bring herself to think he's wrong in this case.

For a couple more minutes there's noise and she works steadily at the second lock. She's back to a choice: she can be scared, or she can be pissed. So she picks pissed, and when Sam comes back around the corner into her little space she glares at him. His forehead furrows in a confusion she remembers all too well now, but he drops to his knees next to her and reaches for the lockpicks.

"Hey, you got one," he says, and actually gives her a tiny smile.

"Did you set the fire?" she demands.

His hands go still for a second and he looks up at her. He asks, "What fire?" but from the tone of his voice she thinks he knows; thinks he recognized her too.

"The fire that killed Jess," she says. "The fire that you ran away after." Janet knows it's insane to be antagonizing him now. This is three days of panic, combined with the old hurt of losing Jess and losing Sam, or at least the Sam she thought she knew.

"No," says another voice, "and neither did I." Janet looks over and there's another man; he doesn't look much like Sam anywhere but around the eyes, but she recognizes him from the pictures Agent Henricksen showed her. This is the crazy older brother, Dean. This is the man who's led Sam into insanity and murder. Janet hates him on sight, though under other circumstances she'd be thinking _Damn he's hot_. "Let me guess, you've been talking to our dear friend Agent Henricksen," he continues, and gives her a cocky grin that reminds her of Bill, a little.

"How many people did you kill to get me out of this?" Janet asks, even as the lock clicks open. She gives in to the temptation to rub her wrists just like every cliché damsel in distress as she gets to her feet, Sam standing up and taking a half-step back, as if reflexively, so he's not looming over her.

"People? None," Dean says. The truly frightening thing is that she can see even on thirty seconds' acquaintance that he _believes_ that.

"There were nine of them," Sam says quietly. "You might want to keep your eyes closed on the way out-" 

"I've seen bodies before," Janet snaps.

"The bodies of the other women they took are out there," Sam says. "They—it wasn't-"

"They died screaming," Janet says. "I heard them." Right about there she realizes she's shaking, shaking fit to shake herself apart, and her legs give out and she sinks to the floor again and she can hear someone whining in fear and she has time to be annoyed that it's her before the tears come.

Sam hunkers down next to her and actually puts an arm around her shoulders, tentatively, like he's expecting her to explode, and she knows she should tell him not to touch her but she can't bring herself to forgo this comfort; no matter how wrong he is now, this is the man who saved her life.

After a few minutes she pulls herself together. They go out by way of the heap that her captors had thrown her personal effects into, along with the things that belonged to the other women, and Janet picks out her phone and her purse and her coat.

She counts eight other purses.

Sam and his brother leave her outside the warehouse. She calls 911 as she watches them climb into a big black car that later she will describe only as "looking old". (Janet's father laughed till he choked at the courtroom scene at the end of _My Cousin Vinnie_ because, though she doesn't have Marissa Tomei's accent, she said "It's a trick question" right before the actress did. But no one expects a young woman to be able to identify a 1967 Impala by sight.)

When Agent Henricksen comes to see her again, while she's still taking time off work to recover, she answers every question, but she's pretty sure he knows she's holding something back. And when he asks her straight out what it might be, she's kind of impressed, and so she says, "Look. They saved my life. How am I not grateful for that?"

"They killed nine people," Henricksen says. She gives in to impulse and rolls her eyes at him.

"Those people? Killed eight women by torture," she says. "They'd have killed me too if Sam and Dean hadn't shown up. Forgive me if I'm not too upset about their relatively quick and easy deaths."

Henricksen just stares at her, trying to be intimidating and win her over with the power of the law, and Janet tries not to laugh in his face. Finally she says, "OK, I think this interview is over."

Henricksen gets reluctantly to his feet. They say their goodbyes in stilted politeness, and right before he steps out the door the agent turns to her and says urgently, "You get that these are not good guys, right? They are killers. They kill people."

Janet thinks of Sam's hands, carefully working at the lock even as she all but accused him of killing Jess. She thinks of the dead bodies of her captors, and the way Dean dismissed them as not people, and she can't reconcile the two. So she just looks at Henricksen and says, "They saved me." And then, "I know Sam's...not the person I remember. I don't know if he ever was." Henricksen returns her gaze for a long moment, and then nods, looking resigned if not exactly understanding.

Janet watches him go, and then goes back to the kitchen to make tea. She sits down, and the memory of what Sam could have been, should have been, washes over her like the tide coming in, and she cries until long after the mug before her is cool.


End file.
